Archive/File: people/i/irving.david/libel.suit/transcripts/day008.39
Last-Modified: 2000/07/20
Q. That includes eyewitness testimony from other people with
whom the particular witness has not had any contact, does
it not?
A. Yes, except indirectly of course through the interrogator.
Q. Yes. If the Brits and the Poles put their heads together
and produce what we might call a joint questionnaire which
is uniformly put to all eyewitnesses, I quite agree with
you. Have you any evidence of that?
. P-164
A. I did not say that.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: Is the answer no?
MR RAMPTON: The answer is no, is it not?
A. No, but if the same British interrogator questions two
people in a row, then there will be a certain amount of
cross-pollination between the two reports.
Q. But if somebody is being questioned in London and somebody
else is being questioned in Norway and somebody else is
being questioned in Poland, then unless the interrogators
have put their heads together, there is no chance that the
witnesses's testimony may be mistaken?
A. Yes.
Q. But there is no chance that it is going to be deliberately
fabricated in that way, is there?
A. No, not in that way.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: Can you tell, me and it may be that this is
too general a question to be capable of being answered,
what you say the motivation of the eyewitnesses who
painted a false picture of what had been going on in
Auschwitz was?
A. I would say it varies, my Lord. It would be partly fear,
partly the promise of alleviated punishment, partly
torture, partly pecuniary. It depends on when we are
talking about, whether it was done recently in connection
a Hollywood film or back in 1945 to assist the Polish
authorities.
. P-165
Q. You sound from that answer as if you are really talking
about camp officials?
A. I am talking about camp officials.
Q. Rather than survivors. What about the motivation of the
survivors?
A. To my knowledge none of the survivors who are not camp
officials claimed to have been in gas chambers, inside
them.
Q. No, but they give what admittedly would be circumstantial
evidence, but nevertheless quite vivid circumstantial
evidence ----
A. They give a lot circumstantial evidence.
Q. --- about what they infer must have been happening, do
they not?
A. I really hesitate to set traps for myself by generalizing,
my Lord. I prefer to see precisely who we are talking
about. When we are dealing with camp officials we have
the odd phenomenon that people who would normally be
candidates for the gallows somehow survive, and almost
entirely coincidentally give statements that undoubtedly
Mr Rampton will be relying on.
MR RAMPTON: You see, if you read Professor van Pelt's report,
Mr Irving, which I think you probably have done, you find
evidence from what he calls perpetrators, camp officials,
Rudolf Hess, Broad, Altemeyer, Gravno, people like that,
which is broadly consistent, is it not, in every detail?
. P-166
But that is the nature of eyewitness testimony,
Mr Irving. You would agree, would you not, eyewitness
testimony which is consistent in every detail is highly
suspicious, would you agree?
A. It prompts the word "collusion" to mind.
Q. Yes, exactly, collusion. But eyewitness testimony, which
is broadly consistent but which has differences of detail,
is, unless there is reason to think that the person is
lying, reliable as an honest account even if it be a
mistaken one. Do you agree?
A. It depends what you call difficulties of detail. If they
are really scandalously large differences, discrepancies,
then you have to a ask yourself how and why the
discrepancy exists. I am thinking, for example, of the
memoirs of Hirst [sic - Hoess].
Q. Yes. Hirst's own various accounts are not consistent
amongst themselves, are they?
A. Which suggests that one should straightaway, if one is a
reasonable historian, discard him as a source completely.
Q. No. This would be grossly improper as a reasonable
historian, Mr Irving, may I suggest. The right approach to
such evidence is to treat it with all caution and to ask
oneself, where can I check it against other evidence to
see whether it is accurate or not?
A. I agree.
Q. One can could do that with Commander Hirst.
. P-167
A. It is a yellow light, proceed with caution.
Q. Yes, proceed with caution. One can do that with Commander
Hirst and one can find, unless he has been fed his lines
by the polls, corroboration for almost all the important
things that he says in his various statements, do you
agree?
A. I think Hirst and Eichmann are two pitiful characters --
Eichmann is another eyewitness -- where we need to know a
great deal almost as psychologists about their mentality
of this servile eager to please kind of mentality that we
are feeling with. That is why I hate using eyewitness
evidence because you have intangible subjective factors
coming in, where all your instincts as a historian, as
I say, will close to cover on that file because this file
is trouble, let us look for something that is more
concrete. Altemeyer is another case in mind.
Q. I cannot accept that, Mr Irving. You will take as an
historian, if you have an open mind that is, such evidence
as there is, give it such weight as it may deserve and you
will then make a decision whether or not to discard it.
A. That is an alternative approach.
Q. You do not discard a piece of evidence just because it is
rocky in some area.
A. In the case of Hirst, you see, you have the following
problem. He undoubtedly deserved it. He was brutally
treated when he was taken prisoner by the by British in
. P-168
March 1946. He was very badly man handled. At the end of
the following year, of course, he was then hanged by the
Poles and I would be the last person to say he did not
deserve it. In between those months, the day of his
arrest and the day of his final hanging, execution and
hanging, we do not know what went through his tortured
mind. We do know that his report is full of the most
incredible misstatements so that even Adolf Eichmann,
writing in the margin of the Hirst report, and I have this
book actually in my hand, because somebody bought it in a
second hand book shop, with Eichmann's comments on it,
said this man is talking through his hat. This is totally
untrue. It renders the whole source document so suspect
that either you can use it indiscriminately and say, hey
this helps my case and I am going to use every bit I can
that is of use and pretend the rest does not exist, which
is what the average historian has done, or in my case you
say this document is so suspect I do not want to go
anywhere near it. That is the way I would treat it.
Q. But, you see, the problem is, Mr Irving, that much of what
Hirst said is corroborated by other people, is it not?
A. You say corroborated but, of course, we do not know how
far it has been cross pollinated by reading the
newspapers.
Q. That is a different point.
A. By sitting in the same court house and hearing what other
. P-169
people are saying, by being told by interrogating
officers, "If you sign this affidavit we have typed up,
then we will get you a shorter sentence". This is the
kind of thing that went on at Nuremberg, along with a lot
of uglier things. These so-called affidavits that these
people signed were not written out in their own longhand.
They were dictated to them and they were then obliged to
sign them.
Q. Are you familiar with the testimony which Eric Bauer gave
at Ludwigsberg in, I do not know what year it was?
A. No, I am not, I can read it though.
Q. My Lord, I am looking at page 581 of van Pelt. He is
recorded by Professor van Pelt to have testified as
follows about the extermination of Jews in Sobibor.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: Let Mr Irving find it.
MR RAMPTON: I am sorry.
A. Can I say straightaway that I have myself been before the
courts in Austria. They do not take verbatim testimony in
the manner that we take here with court reporters. The
report is drawn up by a court official in abbreviated form
so these are not necessarily ----
Q. Well, it is in the first person. I dare say, I do not
know, I have not seen the original document. Maybe it is
in the file. He said this, he also used the word
vergassung as an adjective, he is talking about gassing of
Jews at Sobibor, "The doors were sealed airtight and
. P-170
immediately the gassing procedure
vergassungsforgang commenced". Is that after some 20 to
30 minutes, complete silence in the gas chambers, people
were vergassed?
A. He is probably accurate. He is probably describing
something that really happened there.
Q. It is the same formation, is it not, vergassungswagen we
see with Eichmann at the top of the page? We notice
Wetzel's vergassungsakavater earlier.
A. There is no other way you could describe gassing procedure
except by the German phrase vergassungsforgang.
Q. Then we come to Dayaco and Eiffel, who were tried, I think
in ----
A. 1972. I believe I am right in saying that they were both
aquitted, oddly enough, were they not?
Q. I believe that they were acquitted.
A. So obviously the court did not pay much attention to this
kind of evidence. They had the chance of cross-examining
the witnesses.
Q. We should take precedent from that, should we, Mr Irving?
A. Certainly, if they hear the same witnesses. We do not
have the chance of cross-examining these witnesses that
you are giving to me now, but if the court in Vienna
acquitted Dayaco and Eiffel, who were the architects of
Auschwitz, they were acquitted and set free. They had had
the chance of cross-examining these witnesses. Surely
. P-171
that should say something to you about the value of the
testimony they gave.
Q. It says nothing to me at all because I do not know the
reason why they were acquitted.
A. They were acquitted because they were innocent.
Q. There are all sorts of reasons why people can be
acquitted. If you are anxious to find out the answer to
why they were acquitted, you can ask Professor van Pelt.
A. I know why they were acquitted. I know their case quite well.
Q. You see, it says both Dayaco and Eiffel, testifying during
their trial in 1972, used the term "gassing spaces"
vergassungsraume to denote gas chambers. You can see that
that is so if you turn back -- I am sorry it is such a
long journey -- to page 341 of the same report, my Lord.
Would your Lordship at the same time find it convenient to
turn up this document? It is in the same file. You might
do the same, Mr Irving. In the smaller of the two
Auschwitz files, the second one, there is a document at
page 2 to which this part of the text of van Pelt refers.
A. The smaller of the two Auschwitz files at page 2?
Q. Tab 4, sorry, yes. Tab 4, page 2. It is in the same set
of originals.
A. The same document.
Q. Just so that, if you want to, you can look at the original German.
. P-172
A. Can I draw attention to the brief number on that document,
handwritten number?
Q. Yes.
A. I do not say these things just to be pig headed about
documents arousing my suspicion.
Q. At the top of page 341 of van Pelt we see this: "On August
19th 1942 Eiffel chaired a meeting in which members of the
Central Construction Office discussed with engineer Kurt
Brufer of Topf and sons the creation of four crematoria in
Birkenhau. Item 2 mentioned the construction of two
triple oven incinerators near the bath houses for special
actions".
If you look over at the other document, the
original German document, it is in paragraph 2 on the
first page, first sentence, is it not?
A. Yes.
Q. Could you read out what it says in German?
A. [German spoken- document not provided].
Q. No, I am sorry, I meant translated.
A. With regard to the erection of two each three muffle
furnaces at the bath house for special actions we propose
Engineer Brufer suggested ----
Q. That will do.
A. Taking the furnaces ----

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